juniorbill

Such a deal! Look for an e-mail from me. What a great board. I don't have time to come here often, but when I do I always come across the greatest folks. Must be a Subaru thing.

Thanks for checking - I didn't know how or where to check. The neighborhood guy parts guy called all the local distributors to no avail. ... What about one from a 92? There was one on ebay a couple of weeks ago (before mine started sqealing) that didn't sell; maybe if I'm lucky it's still available.

My power steering pump sounds like it's going - bearing is squealing. I have a 93 Legacy non-turbo automatic. My local auto parts places can't find a rebuilt. Does anyone know if a pump from a 95 Legacy wagon manual would work OK? Thanks for your thoughts.

Turns out it was the water pump. Thanks for everyone's input. Luckily one of the local dealers has Saturday hours for parts - I figured I should go with a factory water pump, not Cheapyzone, because I only want to do this once. The only problems I had were, one, I overtorqued one of the water pump bolts and it sheared (and yes, I know overtorquing will compress the gasket), but luckily it wasn't hard to remove and a local parts store had a perfect match; and two, I had a tough time getting trapped air out of the cooling system. I don't know if this is the preferred method, but I ended up putting the front up on ramps to help bleed the air out through the bleeding screw. Thanks again for everyone who shared their thoughts.

Setright - not much smoke, but it was coming from down by the crankshaft pulley, not the alternator. But the belts definitely were turning. I don't remember any harsh electronic or rubber smell, but there may not have been enough to really notice.

I hope it's an external item with a bad bearing and not an internal one. We (father-in-law and I) replaced the timing belt late last summer, but that didn't lead to any problems. However, it's been eating alternators at the rate of a couple a year (cheap but lifetime warranted Autozone ones, so the replacements are free). Maybe that's related - if the belt was too tight and the bearing on something else on the same belt was ready to go bad. Guess we'll be doing some investigating over the weekend. Thanks for the suggestions so far.

I was thinking about maybe the heat shield after I posted, but then I had to drive home to let my son back in the house after he locked himself out. The whole drive home the noise wasn't there. Pulling in the driveway I heard a strange, squeeling-like sound. When I was ready to leave I restarted the car and started backing out when I heard more strange sounds, hard to describe, and the engine started to stall. Checked the oil and it was still OK, then started it again with the hood up and saw a small amount of smoke rising out of the area of the (not sure of terminology here) main engine pulley, where the alternator and a/c belt converge. So I left it in the driveway and had my son drive me back to work. Any ideas?

Hello. I'm new to the forum, although I've visited a couple of times. Maybe someone can help me with my 93 Legacy, FWD, 148,000 mi. Last night it started making an irregular, metallic sounding tapping/rattling noise that seems to be coming from the lower part of the engine. By irregular I mean it's not rhythmic, it varies from several times a second to maybe a second or two between taps. I found that I was a quart low on oil, but adding a quart didn’t seem to make a difference - although it has been just about 2,000 miles and 2 months since my last oil change, and I never noticed using that much oil before. The noise wasn't there this morning when the engine was cold but I heard it again when I arrived at work, about 9 miles. I just tried changing the RPMs at idle, and above about 1,000-1,500 RPM I think it goes away, but I’m not positive because of the regular engine noise. When I let the idle back down, however, it started to make a racket. After doing that a few times, trying to find the point at which the noise abates, it stopped even at the regular idle of about 400 RPM, but I don’t suppose that magically fixed it for good. No idiot lights, temperature gauge is fine, seems to run fine - acceleration, etc., all normal. Oil looks fairly clean - no signs of coolant in it, and the coolant doesn’t look oily. Maybe the oil pump is bad? I'm hoping this sounds very simple to those who know more about engines than I do - maybe not easy or inexpensive, but simple. ... Sorry for the long post - I wanted to include as much info as possible so the resident experts can share their wisdom.